About a year ago we released the freeware Pocket PC search program PPCFinder. This program has had literally thousands of downloads subsequently with only a single release.

I’m proud to announce the first public update of the program since it’s original release. The maintenance release 1.0.0.5.

The “backstory” of PPCFinder is a plane flight home from Sydney to Brisbane. In the past I found the inbuilt Windows Mobile search completely inadequate. The available freeware alternatives seemed unpleasant to use and the commercial ones seemed to be as an ajunct to filemanager functionality. It was time to write my own….In only a few days, PPCFinder was born.

PPCFinder is a simple program that still addresses an important need on the Windows Mobile Platform. That is the need to find files, particularly large ones (the definition of “large” has changed since the default search application in Windows Mobile was created), in order to get extra memory.

PPCFinder gives you all the “advanced” search options available to the original Windows XP search, including the cute doggy mascot that I’m sure you find excellent.

I found a neat article by one of the Silverlight team describing the way network calls work in xap applications.

What I find particularly interesting is the fact that the host browsers communications stack is used for HTTP communication. This means that cookies and authentication from the current browser session are sent in these calls.

This means that composite applications that support both web and Silverlight content should work really well.

Private Sub inkPanel_MouseMove(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Windows.Forms.MouseEventArgs) Handles inkPanel.MouseMove If mbPenDown Then moCurrentWriting.Add(e.Location) mdLastSignatureUpdate = Now Me.Refresh() End If End Sub

Private Sub inkPanel_MouseUp(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Windows.Forms.MouseEventArgs) Handles inkPanel.MouseUp If moCurrentWriting.Count > 2 Then moRememberInk.Add(moCurrentWriting) End If

<System.ComponentModel.DesignerSerializationVisibility(System.ComponentModel.DesignerSerializationVisibility.Hidden)> _ Public ReadOnly Property SignatureImage() As Image Get Dim loBitmap As New Bitmap(Me.Width, Me.Height) Using loGfx As Graphics = Graphics.FromImage(loBitmap) mRenderSignature(loGfx) End Using

Return loBitmap End Get End Property

End Class

If anyone’s interested in a standalone sample project, post the request to this blog and I’ll see what I can do.

Possible Uses

It may be interesting to use this code as:

Signature recognition

“Mud map” style sketching for business applications

A basis for a drawing program 😉

Of course, if you’re using WPF, use InkPanel. But if you don’t want the overhead, maybe this will be the foundation of a lightweight solution.